Conditional Immortality

I

IMMORTAL life is once more widely canvassed. A distinguished man of science has recently told his colleagues that man has a soul which survives the dissolution of the body. Another not less eminent announced a year before that the soul is but an efflorescence of the body. When the brains are out, the man is dead, and there an end.

The question is everlasting. In one of the older Upanishads, millenniums back, young Nachiketas addresses Yama, lord of death, who has given him three wishes: —

‘This doubt that there is, concerning the man who has gone forth: “He exists,” say some, and “He exists not,” others say; this would I know, taught by thee. This of my wishes is the third!’

The lord of death replies: ‘Even by the gods of old it was doubted concerning this. . . .’

Writing not long ago, one of our philosophers of science said that there are three possible answers: personal life survives the death of the body; or, consciousness ends with bodily death; or, our separate consciousness is absorbed into a common reservoir of consciousness — the dewdrop slips into the shining sea.

Instead of these being alternatives, may there not be a more inclusive answer: that the three possibilities are concurrently true; when certain conditions are fulfilled, individual consciousness persists after bodily death; when these conditions are lacking, there is, at best, a very limited survival; there is a reservoir of consciousness, a boundless deep, into which the individual life may enter, not to be absorbed and lost, but to grow and expand to a splendor of which we can hardly conceive?

It is better, perhaps, to speak of the survival of consciousness than of the immortality of the soul; for the meaning of ‘ soul’ is rather vague and undetermined, while ‘consciousness’ is something that every one of us is familiar with, through every hour of our waking lives.

Consciousness is a familiar experience; nay, more, it is the condition of all experience without exception, the one thing in the universe that we know at first hand. Yet the truth is that, while we are all endowed with consciousness, it is a rare thing for any of us to look at consciousness directly, turning consciousness back upon itself, as it were, and making a sustained effort to solve its mysteries. Perhaps our modern consciousness is too packed and crowded with activities, too careful and troubled about many things, to look backward within itself. Perhaps in past centuries our destiny after death has been surrounded by too many terrors for us to consider it with serenity. The fact remains that there are few quiet hours in which we may be conscious of our own consciousness.

But let us go back to the second of our two eminent men of science, who holds that death ends all. He is a profound believer in the method and conclusions of science. One wonders whether he may sometimes realize that, outside consciousness, science itself has no existence; that our conception of matter exists wholly in consciousness.

What, after all, is matter? A few years since, before the discoveries of Henri Becquerel and the Curies, the answer seemed plain enough. When John Tyndall said, in the famous Belfast address, ‘We find in matter the promise and potency of every form of life,’ he was quite confident that he knew what matter was, and his hearers were ready to admit his knowledge. Matter was in those days a conglomerate of the chemical atoms of John Dalton, which were conceived as little round bodies like marbles, possibly furnished with hooks to link them together; there were about a hundred kinds of these little marbles, differing at least in weight, the uranium atom being two hundred and forty times heavier than the hydrogen atom. For a century they worked admirably, yielding abundant fruits — theoretical, as in the harmonic table of Mendelyeev; practical, in our chemical industries. Yet, in the strict sense, the atoms of Dalton do not exist; they never did exist outside the consciousness of Dalton and his fellow chemists. A mysterious something exists, subject to harmonic law, but not Dalton’s atoms. And the power to perceive this harmonic law exists in consciousness; we can hardly conceive of that perception as existing in the atoms themselves.

After radioactivity was explored, electrons superseded the atoms of Dalton — units, positive and negative, of electricity, as we are told; though what electricity is in itself, and why it exists in units of these two kinds, remains a mystery; and our problem is not made easier when we are told that every atom, every defined group of spinning electrons, is endowed with a set of waves, while one school holds that the atom is merely the starting point of the waves and has no substantial existence at all. So the evolutionary development of the atom continues; it is a development in our consciousness; the atoms themselves, whatever they may be, are not affected by this development. Further, we are told that the electrons which build up the atoms are grouped in complex schemes somewhat like the solar system, with the sun in the centre and the planets revolving in space, the distances being relatively immense.

If, then, we are to find in matter the promise and potency of every form of life; if, with our great anatomist, we are to maintain that consciousness is a function of the body and brain, we ought to be able to form some conception of how this function is exercised, how it comes into existence. But the truth is that, whatever view of the atoms and electrons we accept, whether the more conservative protons and electrons, the more radical systems of waves, or a compromise between the two, it is wholly inconceivable that these electrons or the resultant atoms should be arranged in a pattern which would result in a perceiving consciousness, or, even more, in self-consciousness as we know it. No philosophic speculation can bridge that chasm. There is, perhaps, one possible loophole : that each electron is endowed with consciousness from the very beginning; that consciousness is coeval with these primordial units of being. But, if we accept this solution, we thereby admit that the origin of consciousness is an insoluble mystery; that consciousness is inherent, beginningless, and, it would logically follow, endless.

In a certain sense, these are artificial difficulties. We are in reality under no obligation to leap across the chasm and to seek for consciousness in a pattern of electrons. We need not seek for it there or elsewhere. It is already found, within ourselves; is, indeed, the seeker, whether among electrons of its own imagining or in its own mysterious depths. Let us, then, begin where we are, and consider our consciousness as we are conscious of it.

II

The first quality or power of consciousness is to be conscious — an activity so astounding that we are, for the most part, wholly unaware of it. But consider for a moment. We are aware of curiously formed black marks on a white page; aware that they form patterns which we recognize as representing sounds; aware that these sounds carry a consistent meaning, which weaves itself together in our minds; aware of that meaning; and, finally, aware that we are aware of it. We are so familiar with every step of this miraculous way that we no longer see the miracle; yet miracle it is. And, as already suggested, it is wholly inconceivable that this miracle could arise from any rearrangement of electrons, unless we suppose them already endowed with perceptive consciousness.

Like the rest of mankind, our men of science almost unconsciously take this miracle for granted. Then they go courageously forward, building up the great structure of science — and consistently making use of other functions of consciousness hardly less mysterious than this primary quality of awareness, of perception. For no one will study science unless he believes that science is a reality; that truth exists, that it can be discovered, that it can be verified. But we may legitimately ask: Whence comes this concept of truth, and of truth that can be verified? We can hardly conceive it as proceeding from a pattern of electrons and protons, in whatever complexity we may arrange them. Yet the concept is there; or, rather, it is here, within our minds, and in every mind. For every human being, whether scientist or not, has some notion of the reality of things, however partial, even erroneous, that notion may be.

We can imagine a consciousness endowed with the primary quality of awareness, a bare perceiving consciousness, faced by a cont inual stream of appearances like floating clouds, and never rising to this second thought of reality, of truth — never gaining the first inkling of that kind of intelligence from which science is developed. So we are compelled to come to the conclusion that in our consciousness, besides the first miracle of awareness, there is inherent this second miracle, the concept of reality. If we add the thought of verifiable reality, we have added still further miracles: namely, the thought of continuity, of harmonious development, and, finally, of recognition. When the predicted result occurs, we recognize that it is the predicted result — something hardly less wonderful than the first miracle, that we are aware at all.

What has this to do with immortality, and with possible conditions of immortality? Primarily this: that immortality, if it be true, must be a quality of consciousness; and that, if we begin by some understanding of consciousness, some recognition of its real character, and the contrast between that character and what we are taught concerning matter, we shall have taken the first step toward understanding the deeper mysteries of consciousness.

We have already found in our consciousness three things: awareness, the sense of reality, the sense of harmonious continuity. And these three powers underlie every step of science. Without them, no step could be taken. Yet it appears to be broadly true that many of our men of science take these steps, and take them continually, without any conscious recognition of the powers of consciousness which make these steps possible. If they really recognized these powers, it is inconceivable that they should be materialists, for the simple reason that such powers cannot conceivably proceed from matter as they depict it — from patterns of protons and electrons, even with their attendant waves.

Our men of science perpetually use yet another quality of consciousness, seemingly without recognizing its immense significance. Consider a student of the rocks in the gorge of the Niagara River. He sees many things that the unskilled eye fails to perceive. In part, this is the reward of developed attention. He notes, for example, that the scars made by glacial rocks are clearly marked below a certain point; that above this point they are absent. He sees, and he interprets. He knows that the edge of the falls recedes as the rushing water wears away the rock. The terrapin tower of older days thus disappeared, undermined and overwhelmed. He measures the rate of recession, compares it with the distance of the glacial markings from the present falls, and calculates that these marks must have been made some fifteen or twenty thousand years ago. But this is only the beginning of his journey backward into the past. He examines the rocks above the level of the track, and recognizes that they are of Silurian age — almost certainly not less than a hundred million years old.

Fifteen or twenty thousand years for the glacial scars; a hundred million years for the level layers of shale. Yet the scars and the rocks are both of them in the moment when he is observing them; it is now, now, now — never anything else. Just as we do well consciously to rest our attention on the first miracle of awareness, so we shall do well to rest our attention on this second marvelous fact: that it is perpetually now, now, now — never anything else. The Silurian shales are in to-day; it is we who, by virtue of a power in our consciousness, project them backward through a hundred million years — an expression indefinite enough, yet holding the sense of enormous duration. Once more, it is wholly inconceivable that this feeling of duration could be generated from any patterning of protons and electrons. For these mysterious units of even more mysterious electricity, as they are depicted to us, it is always now, now, now. They are whirling ceaselessly, we are told, yet in themselves they do not change. Even Millikan, in his magnificent conception of cosmic rays, does not speak of the generation of protons and electrons, but simply of their combination into atoms, of helium, oxygen, silicon, and iron. So, as at present conceived, electrons are unchangeable throughout all time — which is the same as saying that, for them, time has no existence; it is always now. No arranging them into new patterns can alter that fundamental fact. If, as we have suggested, there is in each electron and proton some germ of consciousness, then it is a consciousness beginningless and endless, and without change or the sense of duration — an absolute immortality.

Yet that we ourselves have the sense of duration is as certain as it is mysterious. And it is also certain that every student of science, in every step of scientific thought, takes this marvelous power for granted — for the most part, as it would seem, quite unconsciously, hardly at all realizing what it implies. For the only possible conclusion is that the sense of duration is inherent in consciousness, like awareness itself, the primal miracle. If, then, duration be inherent in consciousness, we have a first step toward continuity of consciousness, toward immortality.

These powers of consciousness are all matters of universal knowledge, effective in every step of scientific thought, equally operative in each detail of practical life. In to-day, even that hypothetical personage, the man in the street, also thinks of yesterday and to-morrow. But one may doubt that he realizes that it is eternally impossible to prove that there was a yesterday, as it is eternally impossible to anticipate to-morrow. Every scrap of proof he relies on — memory, documents, testimony — exists, not in yesterday, but in to-day; for the evidence, as for the man in the street himself, it is never anything but. now, now, now; it can never by any possibility become then. The sense of yesterday, of the past, as the sense of a coming to-morrow and of the future, is in consciousness and nowhere else. It rests on the awareness of duration, a fundamental quality of our consciousness itself.

There is another quality of consciousness, implicitly taken for granted both by the man of science and by his brother the man in the street, though it is probable that the one no more realizes it than the other. Yet it underlies each and every detail of our human life, exactly as the sense of the reality of things underlies every detail of scientific thought and of practical action. When we meet a friend, or an enemy, and address him in friendly or hostile words, with warmth or with heat, as the case may be, we have taken something for granted, something as marvelous as awareness itself. We have taken for granted that he is there; that, whether he be friend or enemy, he is a consciousness cognate with ourselves, or, more generally, that there is kindred consciousness outside the limit of our own consciousness. And this is taken for granted, always and everywhere, by every man, woman, and child: semper, ubique, et ab omnibus.

It is taken for granted by the simplest child of man, and as completely by the most erudite scientist. Otherwise, why does he seek to impart his conclusions to his equally erudite brothers? Or, to ask the logically previous question, how does he come to believe that this imparting is possible? It has been a commonplace of philosophy for several thousand years that no proof of my neighbor’s consciousness, as the logician conceives proof, is possible, just as there is no complete logical proof of the existence of an objective world. A very ancient school in India took one step more and added that there is equally no logical proof of the existence of a perceiving consciousness. It is perfectly true. But this is really a description of the limitation of logical proof, and in no way impeaches the fundamental realities of experience, which antecede all operations of logic. Our consciousness, our awareness, are realities of direct experience, and on these realities all logical reasoning, and all practical life, are based.

So certainty of kindred consciousness in others is an inherent quality of our consciousness, on which everyone without exception acts perpetually, always has acted, always will act. It is, if we wish so to name it, a fundamental intuition, like the intuition of being.

Of this primal reality there would seem to be only one possible explanation: namely, that behind and beneath the seemingly isolated consciousness of each one of us there is a common substratum, a general layer of consciousness; and that it is in virtue of this common substratum that we are so firmly convinced of the reality, the consciousness, of each other. This would supply a reasonable foundation for the admitted solidarity of human life, for all practical acting and thinking which involve other people besides ourselves. The man in the street, and equally the woman and the child, who everlastingly take this common consciousness for granted, and act on it, are therefore fully justified. The basis of their action is there, in this enduring layer of consciousness behind and above our separate selves.

The man of science is not less fully justified. When he says that ‘science’ teaches this or that, or that a snail or a thrush or a star is ‘new to science,’ he does not mean his own personal observation and reasoning. He evidently means something at once larger and more stable: the collective consciousness of a large body of men trained in certain habits of observation and inference, and the entire sum of observations and inferences which abide in this collective consciousness. Therefore we are justified in saying, not only that science exists only in consciousness, but, in addition, that science exists only in the collective consciousness to which every student of science appeals, whenever he records and gives out his observations and conclusions, and equally when he studies the observations and conclusions of his colleagues. All this is matter of universal knowledge, to be dwelt on only because so few of us draw from it the conclusion which appears to be inevitable: namely, the reality of this general substratum of consciousness.

III

Does it follow from these conclusions, if we accept them as well founded and established, that a full continuity of consciousness is assured for every human being — man, woman, and child? That bodily death is only an incident upon the surface of the great substratum of consciousness? That immortal life is a rule which knows no exceptions? Here, in reality, we come to the heart of the matter. Let us consider it well.

When one who is not a philosopher or given to mental analysis thinks of his personal survival after death, he has in mind something which he thinks of as entirely definite: namely, the perpetuated existence of himself as he knows himself at that moment, with such a name, such a face and form, such and such personal memories, wishes, habits of thought ; an immensely varied conglomerate of physical characters, and also what we may call, for want of a more appropriate name, an even more diverse collection of psychical characters. We are not losing sight of the beginnings of this group of characters, or of their almost beginningless biological history; but for the present we must limit ourselves to the actual man as he recognizes himself. Is he, exactly as he thus recognizes himself, endowed with perpetual life? He may begin by believing or hoping that he is so endowed. If he be wise, he may end by hoping most sincerely that he is not.

Let us consider some of the things which make up his personality, as he himself knows it. First, there is his personal name. We may not often realize how fully we identify ourselves with our personal names; how large a part of our feeling of identity is tied up with them. But names may be changed, by inheritance, by marriage, by a court of law; or they may be forgotten, in cases of amnesia. How completely victims of amnesia are at sea our daily records testify. As with names, so is it with personal features. Mirrors aid greatly in forming our mental images of ourselves, what we think of as our personalities. But we must make continual adjustments as the years pass, and we make our way through the seven ages. So with our psychical furniture: memories which grow dim in part, and in part are added to; knowledge which may fade, or be enriched by new fields of learning; passions which may flare up or burn themselves out to ashes; personal contacts which may be lost, while new associations are gained. Neither in the bodily nor in the mental furniture is there anything like permanence. In reality both are changing from day to day, from hour to hour.

So long, therefore, as we identify ourselves with these personal vestments, so long are we subject to their mutability. Not only can we not expect a full survival of this personality after death; we cannot expect it to remain unchanged even for the next year, or for the next month or day, of ordinary life; while extraordinary events may change our conception of ourselves tremendously even in a very short time.

Perhaps we have hit upon the clue, in speaking of the things with which we identify ourselves. Perhaps there is no likelihood of unaltered survival for what we call our personal selves, simply because these personal selves are built up of elements, every part of which is impermanent. We attribute the idea of ‘self,’ in our ordinary thinking, to our bodies, or to our minds, in the sense of our ordinary and habitual thoughts, desires, and fears. Yet we all realize, when we consider the matter, that these things are always in flux, never permanent. They pass before our deeper consciousness like moving pictures on a screen. There is always the division between the perceiving consciousness and what is perceived, whether it be our bodily form or the images and thoughts in our minds.

It would seem, then, that we think of all these bodily and mental belongings of ours as being ourselves, while in reality we realize all the time that they are not ourselves; that is, they are other than, and external to, the deeper perceiving consciousness, before which they pass in an endless row, as clouds drift across a mountain peak.

If, instead of fixing our sense of personal identity upon our bodies, our names, our features, our emotions and memories, we identified ourselves with the deeper perceiving consciousness, before which these things pass, then our conclusion might be changed. Let us consider what this might mean if we were able to carry it out.

We have just spoken of our deeper perceiving consciousness as being aware of our bodies, our feelings, and our thoughts. But we should at this point remember that, while turning this consciousness upon itself, to examine it, as we did in the beginning, we found that it contained many things besides bare awareness. We found in it the sense of the reality of being, something not to be established by any logical process, and anteceding every logical process. We found in it the thought of continuity, of harmonious development, which finds expression in every scientific generalization, and equally in every practical undertaking. What practical planners of towns call a ‘development proposition ' has its being in their consciousness before it can embody itself in streets and houses; and it rests altogether on the innate conviction that things progress and open out; on the certainty of harmonious unfolding, which is inherent in consciousness. We found also in our consciousness the marvelous conception of duration, while in our experience we can never find anything beyond the present instant — now, now, now.

Awareness, reality, harmonious progress, duration — these are what we find in consciousness. Thence we project them outward, and discover them in the things which our consciousness perceives, as in the growth of trees and stellar systems. But, if they were not in consciousness first, we should never find them elsewhere; indeed, we should never conceivably seek them elsewhere.

Further, besides these qualities which each one of us finds, or may find if we look for them, in our own consciousness, we have sound reasons for thinking that this separate consciousness of ours is but a part of a far greater whole; that there is a general substratum of consciousness underlying, or overarching, our separate selves, in virtue of which we recognize each other — just as islands are set off and separated by dividing seas, but, if we go down to the ocean depths, are all united by the rock shell of our earth.

If, then, one should be able to identify himself, completely and continuously, first with the true perceiving consciousness in himself, and then with the larger consciousness, one of whose properties is duration, it is entirely possible that he might thereby discover not only a true individuality, as contrasted with outer personal vestments, but also an enduring reality, thereby knowing himself to be immortal, not as a separate person, but as that greater, deeper, more universal consciousness.