The Arithmetic of Life and Death (22 page)

A less committed woman might have settled for a career in county politics, but Flora was an artist. So she took up writing. Alas, her dyslexia, which predated the invention of the spell checker by some fifty years, proved to be a serious handicap. Besides, her parents could afford to send only one daughter to college, and that had to be Fauna, who was more talented and who aspired to teach.

Thus, every door to a career in art seemed to have been slammed shut by handicap or misfortune. However, although more things go wrong, not everything does. One day while Flora was walking home from high school, she happened to pass by a new hair salon in the neighborhood. She stopped to peer in the window and remained there for a long time, so long that the proprietress invited her in to watch firsthand.

Flora and the hairdresser became fast friends, then Flora began to work part-time in the salon. As a helper, she quickly learned that every head of hair was different and that there was an infinity of styles, cuts, and colors for each one. As an apprentice, she learned that her hands were more than strong enough to manage the tools of the art, especially after her experience with the bassoon. And, as a full-fledged hairdresser, she learned that she had the ability to uplift her clientele with an innovative cut, an inspired perm, or an unusual story about the branch of her family that had gone over the mountains to Seattle.

Flora had found her small infinity—and a career in art, in coiffure. In fact, there is a small infinity in an individual strand of hair. Each one is always growing and always changing. It can never be in exactly the same place twice. It can be shortened, straightened, curled, or dyed an endless array of colors. If it falls out, it usually grows back, but differently. If they all fall out, then there is always another head of hair.

In the same way, there is a small infinity in a leaf on a tree, in a cloud in the sky, and in the movements of the pieces on a chessboard. Likewise, there is a small if somewhat grander infinity in gardening, in meteorology, and in competitive chess.

The lesson was not lost on Cecilia, who had a career but no real hobby. Knowing that the responsibilities of motherhood would be behind her too soon, Cecilia resolved to find a small infinity of interest that would outlast both her maternal duties and her work.

Cecilia, like most of us, does not have to face the physical handicaps that had to be overcome by Flora. However, Nature provides all of us with frailties or weaknesses from
birth. As we age, our infirmities accumulate in number and increase in degree, diminishing our ability to experience the full breadth of life.

In return, however, Nature provides us all with an endless supply of small infinities. Each small infinity can be, in itself, an inexhaustible reservoir of unique experience, personal expression, and boundless exploration. Regardless of our state of health, we can never see it all or smell it all or say it all or sew it all or solve it all or sail it all or sink them all. In every small infinity, one of which is the universe of numbers, there is always more.

But perhaps the greatest of all small infinities is the written word. More is being published each day than can be read in any lifetime. Books, newspapers, magazines, and the Internet are an open doorway to every form of experience—past and present, sensory and philosophical, sensible and fantastic. By reading what we can, each of us can survey the known universe of small infinities and choose what we wish to experience firsthand. The right choices can lead to a career, or a passion, or a moment, that will last a lifetime.

T
he question of life after death has persevered through the ages for at least two reasons:

1. From a personal perspective, the stakes are rather high.
   
2. The usual answer, although reassuring, is not certain. In Western culture, only one person is widely believed to have died and come back to tell about the afterlife; it was a long time ago, and His report remains uncorroborated by others of similar stature.
   

It is possible that Nature invented life and death this way on purpose. As long as there is uncertainty in death, then each life must be lived to its fullest. So a firm answer to the question “Is there life after death?” may forever be beyond
mortal proof. But even within the confines of secular experience, we have accumulated an abundance of clues.

Every time a new, more powerful telescope is applied to the exploration of space, more is discovered. Every time a more powerful particle accelerator is applied to the study of subatomic constructs, more is uncovered. New forms of life are being identified all the time, from the past, from the present, possibly even from space. We have even learned that matter is not always matter. Particles can become waves and vice versa, and there is something else called “Dark Matter.” And the advancement of mathematics predicts much more: as many as ten dimensions of existence.

It appears that our universe really is infinitely large, infinitesimally small, and incomprehensibly complex. Everywhere man explores, there is always more.

What, then, is the probability that mankind is the sole exception to this Law of Nature, the “Rule of Always More”? What if, in this one case, all we are is what we can see?

If the total number of cases that fall under the “Rule of Always More” is infinite, as it appears to be so far, then the probability that mankind is the sole example to the contrary is one divided by infinity. One over infinity is as close to zero as you can get without actually getting there. Thus, the “Rule of Always More” seems to be telling us that there are more dimensions of scale and complexity to our own existence than we can ever know in this life.

We also know that Nature conserves everything. No molecule, no atom, no electron, no photon is ever lost because of a change in state. Instead, it is converted into energy, a wave, or some other form of existence. If death is
a change of state, as it seems to be, then what we see of ourselves, and what we can’t see, must also be conserved after the change. The conservation of what we can’t see would seem necessarily to include personality. Even so, we could be more confident if there were another way to infer that individual identity is preserved after death.

However, just to be contrarian, let’s assume that identity is not conserved after death. Then we must also accept that every single sighting of every human apparition, literally millions of them across the history of man, has been a fabrication. But is it possible that everyone who has ever claimed to see a ghost was a liar or delusional?

Let’s assume that only a million people have claimed to have seen a ghost over the entirety of human history, which seems conservatively low, and that 99.99 percent of all such sightings were either delusional or just made up, which seems cautiously high. Then, over the entire 5,000-year course of recorded history, just one hundred people (0.01 percent of one million) have observed a genuine afterlife existence. But that is precisely 100 times as many as necessary, because it takes exactly one legitimate afterlife encounter to prove the point. (Solely on the basis of this model, the inference of life after death is still intact at a prevarication rate of 99.9999 percent.)

Moreover, if there is no life after death, Nature is also on the con. If our identity is not preserved after death, then why can some of us be transported back to previous lives through hypnosis? Is all of that information not really stored in the brain? Can it be just an extemporaneous creation of the mind, or a preprogrammed fantasy—every single time?

And what are we to make of the consistency of reports of
the life-after-death experience: the sense of warmth and well-being, the white light, the reception by past loved ones? If we assume that there is no life after death, then we must conclude that each of these experiences, each and every one, is either a fabrication or, perhaps, some sort of “exit routine” to ease our demise.

Software engineers, by the way, create exit routines to preserve the wholeness and working order of their computer programs so that they can be reused—at another time, in another computer, or in case of an abnormal ending. Maybe Nature has wasted a lot of brain capacity on a useless “exit routine.” But as far as we know, Nature doesn’t waste anything. So perhaps our “programs” are “saved” at death for another container. The Dalai Lama, the leader of the Buddhist religion and the lawful ruler of Tibet, should be happy to provide some spiritual support to this theory. He is, after all, believed to have returned from the dead thirteen times in different incarnations.

But reincarnation is religion, so it may be concoction. Then again, perhaps we can find our immortality in the science of concoction.

For many, many years, astrophysicists were troubled by the math of the Big Bang, that primordial explosion that started all of this so long ago. In a nutshell, there just wasn’t enough matter in the universe to allow galaxies to form, at least according to the theories of a rather highly regarded physicist named Isaac Newton. That meant one of three things:

1. That Newton, despite three hundred years of evidence to the contrary, was wrong.
   
2. That the Milky Way never really existed.
   
3. That there was more matter out there than scientists could detect.
   

Luckily for Newton and the rest of us, the astrophysicists chose option three. So they concocted something called Dark Matter, which cannot be seen but which they hypothesized to comprise some 90 percent of the mass of the known universe. Once they did, the integrity of Newtonian physics was restored. In the few years since then, although it still can’t be seen, firm evidence of Dark Matter has indeed been discovered. The “Rule of Always More,” it seems, even applies to things we cannot see or touch.

Either our personalities are the only known exception to Nature’s Law of Conservation, or there is life after death. Either every past-life experience in the history of man has been an invention, or there is life after death. Either every life-after-life experience has been an illusion, or there is life after death. Either every paranormal experience has been a delusion, or there is life after death. Either every religion has been a concoction, Jesus did not return from the dead, and the Dalai Lama has never come back at all, much less thirteen times, or there is life after death. Either mankind is the only known exception to the “Rule of Always More,” or there is life after death.

In this accumulation of experience and inference, we may be reasonably confident that there is life after death. But only the devout may be certain of it. The rest of us, like those enlightened scientists who “invented” Dark Matter, will have to await corroboration.

T
housands, perhaps millions, believe that they have seen incontrovertible evidence of alien intelligence in the skies over planet Earth. But no respected government body, including NASA and the U.S. Air Force, has ever produced hard evidence to support these observations.

Despite the lack of hard evidence, it is impractical in the extreme to prove that we are alone. The only meticulous method would be to visit every planet in every solar system in every galaxy in the universe, assuming this is the only universe. And despite the rather obvious expense and time consumption, even this could prove to be inconclusive.