Introduction
A friend who is a family therapist and a Unitarian Universalist, tells this story.
My seven-year-old son Eric said to me, “Dad, what happens to us after we die? Is there a heaven?”
“Well, some people believe that after we die we go to heaven where we live forever,” I replied, “and other people believe that when we die, our life is over and we live on through the memories of people who have known and loved us.”
“What do you believe?” said Eric.
“Well, some people believe that after we die we go to heaven, and other people believe. . . .”
“But what do you believe?”
“OK,” I said. “I believe that when we die we live on through other people but not in a heaven.”
Eric took this in and responded with words I will never forget: “I’ll believe what you believe for now, and when I grow up I’ll make up my own mind.”[1]
Which I think is a perfectly Unitarian Universalist response, especially for a 7 year old. And as the grownups in the room, we can make up our own minds, about life, the universe, or anything for that matter. While as Unitarian Universalists, we don’t preach that “you can believe anything you want” — for that just leads to conspiracy theories — we do promote a free and responsible search for meaning, grounded in our own direct experience.
The Veil is Thin
Consider the holidays of this time of year. This is the time when darkness begins to overcome light, when the damp chill and the wind begins to cut through to the bone, even though the temperature is still moderate. The rains strip the trees of their dying leaves, the ground is covered with casual death. It is the time of the ancient holy days, Samheim, that original Pagan holiday from which Halloween, Dia de los Muertos, All Saints Day, all emerged as variants.
It is said that at this time, the veil becomes thin, the border between life and death becomes frayed and fuzzy. At the very least we recall those dear ones who have left this mortal coil, those dying in the past year particularly, and all those far back into the mists of memory.
More profoundly, we are reminded of our own mortality and finitude; we may contemplate what comes after, to seek to know the secret of death. Mortality is part of our direct experience — the experience of being human, experience as affirmed in all cultures, as affirmed in these fall holidays.
Death is our Friend
How do we responsibly find meaning in this universal experience? — in the reality that we all die? Many people, even most people, refuse to embark on such a search for meaning. They are frozen, living in fear of death, unwilling to search for anything beyond the handful of beliefs they were given as children.
But when we search, we find so much more. The great German poet Rainer Marie Rilke wrote a letter to a friend, only a couple of years before Rilke died:
I am not saying that we should love death, but rather that we should love life so generously, without picking and choosing, that we automatically include it (life’s other half) in our love. This is what actually happens in the great expansiveness of love, which cannot be stopped or constricted. It is only because we exclude it that death becomes more and more foreign to us and, ultimately, our enemy….
[He goes on]: Our effort, I suggest, can be dedicated to this: to assume the unity of Life and Death and let it be progressively demonstrated to us…. Death is our Friend, our closest friend, perhaps the only friend who can never be misled by our ploys and vacillations…. Death is our friend precisely because it brings us into absolute and passionate presence with all that is here, that is natural, that is love…. Life always says Yes and No simultaneously. Death (I implore you to believe) is the true Yea-sayer. It stands before eternity and says only: Yes. [2]
To love death, to consider death a friend, now that’s a thought worth exploring!
The American environmentalist and writer Joanna Macy has translated Rilke, and writes of Rilke’s understanding of the world: She says,
In the face of impermanence and death, it takes courage to love the things of this world and to believe that praising them is our noblest calling. Rilke’s is not a conditional courage, dependent on an afterlife. Nor is it a stoic courage, keeping a stiff upper lip when shattered by loss. It is courage born of the ever-unexpected discovery that acceptance of mortality yields an expansion of being. [3]
The Nature of Time
So we befriend death, contemplate it, include it in our awareness and allow it to expand our being. But our inquiring minds still want to know: what happens after we die? Certainly there are a variety of answers — well, really conjectures — out there.
This part of my message today is directed mostly toward those of us who are rationalist, humanist types – those among us who see the world as it is through our senses, and nothing more. True, we amplify those senses through the tools of science, so that we can see to the edge of the universe, and almost all the way back to the beginning in time, and we can see into the mind and its thoughts in the wiring of the brain, but we still see all these things through our senses. How do we as empirical thinkers know the secret of death? What happens after we die?
When we ask, what happens after we die, we first need to ponder the meaning of that word ‘after’. After all, we make assumptions about how we view time. We tend to imagine time flowing, like a river, from the future, into the present, where we are, into the past. We assume that the future is not here yet, it’s undetermined and it is created as we live into it. And death will be the end of all that for each of us.
Of course, we know that physics integrates space and time into a 4-dimensional spacetime. Yet we intuitively assume that time flows, and we’re at NOW, a particular place in time, just as we’re here in this particular place in space.
But what if the future already exists? Imagine that there is this block of time that we’re embedded in, and we’re somewhere in the middle of the block, not at the forming edge. This theory of time is in fact called ‘block time’ or sometimes ‘eternalism’ – you can Google these terms if you want to explore more. This block of time extends all the way back to the beginning of time, perhaps to the Big Bang when the universe was formed, and runs far out into the future to the end of time at the end of the universe.
Now we don’t have scientific means to empirically prove that this ‘block time’ theory is true. However, many theoretical physicists consider eternalism, block time, to be the most attractive formulation of time. For example, it aligns quite naturally with Einstein’s theory of special relativity, which, among other things, says that each point in the universe can have a different sense of the present moment.[4] Eternalism also seems to resolve paradoxes with black holes and issues in quantum gravity.
Free Will
Now, philosophically, eternalism presents some concerns. Most worrisome is the loss of free will. If the future is already laid out in block time, are we just machines grinding through our motions toward a predetermined outcome? That seems to be a particularly unsatisfying formulation for the universe.
Perhaps free will is simply an illusion. As writer Issac Bashevis once commented, “You must believe in free will, there is no choice.”
We’ve known since “the 1980‘s that mechanisms in the brain initiate actions long before brain’s owner is aware of deciding to perform them.”[5] So what we think of as conscious free-will decisions may be only an illusion of choice. As it is, most scientists, most philosophers even, have abandoned the idea of free will.[6]
But again there is the veil. We cannot know the future, whether it is predetermined, completely formed or whether it is being created, moment by moment, like layers of silt on the ocean floor. Just as we cannot know what is beyond the veil of death, we cannot know what is beyond the veil of the present. These things we can only speculate.
Being in the Now
However we imagine the future to unfold, we still are faced with the question of what we should be doing now. Setting all the physics and metaphysics aside, what should we be doing with our lives today? For most of us, that is the truly important question. And like most important questions, it has more than one answer – it has multiple layers.
At the large scale, most of us here strive to live as good people, embodying values like love, generosity, courage, and hope. We try to work in the world to make it a better place, or at the very least, we try to do no harm.
But there’s a small scale too — as in this very instant. What are we doing, right here, right now? Many of us strive to live in the present moment, in the now, as the foundational practice of living a good life. Can we live in this moment, fully experiencing this few hundred milliseconds that our minds tell us is “NOW”? Can we live in this moment, and then in this moment, and then this moment? Can we set aside all those thoughts of past or future, and fully perceive, the flow, the whoosh of time that our minds tells us is happening? Can we just be present in this current moment that is NOW?
Some of us approach being in the NOW through eastern religious practices from Hindu and Buddhist teachings. Others prefer the distilled formulations of science in the form of modern mindfulness meditation. Some of us just seem to have natural talent, born with the gift of staying focused on the present moment, living in the here and now.
Indeed, I think of the poet Mary Oliver, who speaks to us in our earlier reading[7] of this NOW, the now of this fall, with its “vines, leaves, and uneaten fruits crumbling damply in the shadows” — this NOW, not the now of the past summer, for that now is nowhere, she says, “except underfoot, mouldering in that black subterranean castle of unobservable mysteries”
Oliver tells herself:
“I try to remember … how everything lives, shifting
from one bright vision to another, forever
in these momentary pastures.
She is awake, she understands, that our lives are a string of these NOWs, like a string of small glass beads, one bright vision after another.
Comfort in the Now
Having befriended death, what of our dear ones who have died? What of our friends and companions in life, those we’ve loved, who cared for us, who are now gone? The humanists among us accept that we will never see them in some future form, but that that does not matter to them. Their existence in the eternal is enough. They graced us with their presence in our apparent past, and that is enough. Their memories will never die, for they live on in our hearts, just as our memories will live on in the hearts of others.
Consider Albert Einstein, certainly a paradigm of rational thought. Writing a condolence letter to the wife of his longtime friend, the physicist Michele Besso, he said this of his friend:
“Now he has departed this strange world a little ahead of me. That signifies nothing. For us believing physicists, the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.”[8]
For Einstein, for eternalists, comfort comes in the awareness that we are all, together, embedded in block time. Our dear ones exist, just as we exist, intertwined in time, bound together forever.
Conclusion
In a way, that great poet Kahlil Gibran is right: we can come to know the secret of death. We find it where we seek it — “in the heart of life.[9]” We simply must have the courage to become familiar with death, make death a friend, just as we are comfortable with life.
For as Gibran tells us “life and death are one, even as the river and the sea are one.”
And when your lifetime of apparent NOWs, those bright beads, comes to an end, then you will have crested the mountain. He says:
“And when you have reached the mountain top, then you shall begin to climb.
And when the earth shall claim your limbs, then shall you truly dance.”
Notes:
1 http://www.uuworld.org/life/articles/90610.shtml
2 https://www.brainpickings.org/2014/12/10/joanna-macy-a-year-with-rilke-death-mortality/
3 https://www.brainpickings.org/2014/12/10/joanna-macy-a-year-with-rilke-death-mortality/
4 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternalism_(philosophy_of_time)
5 https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg23130890-700-metaphysics-special-do-we-have-free-will/
6 http://www.informationphilosopher.com/freedom/problem/
7 Mary Oliver. “Fall Song”
8 https://www.quantamagazine.org/20160719-time-and-cosmology/
9 Kahlil Gibran, “On Death”