Eternal Life

To be immortal, physically, is impossible. But the feeling of immortality is what we all crave.

At the cinema I'm working at we have been recently showing the Scorsese directed documentary on the Rolling Stones called Shine A Light (aka Dinosaurs 2D). If 60s hippies handed out sainthoods, Keith Richards would surely get one simply for the miracle of his continuing existence. As he himself declares to the audience packed into the theatre in New York, "It's nice to see you! It's nice to see anybody!"

People seek the feeling of immortality in different ways. Some of us have kids. Some of us want to be famous. And watching the Stones still giving it everything on stage and losing themselves in the music, you get the feeling this is another way of feeling immortal - for that brief moment, all that exists is 'now'. Living in the moment is a way of feeling immortal, because the shadow of death is lit up by the burning reality of the now.

Humanity instinctively looks for ways to live in the moment, free from the burden of mortality. Sex, rock and roll, a movie, a show, a video game, a pub crawl, a nightclub - when you live in the moment, it feels like forever.

The other way of feeling immortal is religion. Is religion perhaps a way to allow humanity to step out of the moment without fear; to give humanity the courage to think in the long term?

Imagine two prehistoric tribes. One tribe is craving sex and drugs and rock and roll because death is just around the corner and its scaring the shit out of everyone. 'Live for the moment and get it on!' is their moto. That protective wall isn't going to get built and those crops aren't going to get sown.

Then over the hill you have the second tribe. This tribe is just getting into putting large stones into circles and looking at the stars cos they've had this idea their consciousness bit is some kind of spirit that keeps living on after the body dies.

Ancient historians ask, "Why the hell did they put so much time and energy and resources to building Stonehenge?" Because you'd think they would have all their time taken up by avoiding starvation and man eating creatures. Is this not evidence that the beginnings of civilisation came from the freedom that religion gave us to think in the long term?

The tribe with long-term planning strategies will have the edge in survival terms. The crops will get sown and the defensive wall will get built. Not only that, the warriors will fight without fear, knowing their death is not the end of their journey.

"If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present." Wittgenstein.