The Book of Immortality

by Adam Leith Gollner

  Classical Western philosophers claimed that we are all always able to reconnect with our inherent divinity. Human minds, Socrates argued, stemming from the Demiurge’s mind, contain traces of their original omniscience. Our active intelligence, Aristotle added, is like a spark of God within the brain that returns to God when our bodies die. “It is this alone that is immortal and eternal,” he wrote in De Anima. The part of our mind connected to that ulterior dimension has limitless capacities. It can make anything real. Simply by thinking something, it can bring that thing about. It reaches a point where “that which thinks is the same as that which is thought.” When a thought becomes the object of thought, Aristotle concluded, our consciousness unconsciously realizes that it both emanates from the eternal and is itself eternal.

  Such thinking may seem Eastern at heart, but such is the nature of early Western logic and science. At the start, math wasn’t the rote, rational, and reliable discipline we think it is today. Back then, math was more like a preparatory branch of theology, a means of becoming familiar with immaterial nature. According to the early Greek mathematician Euclid, geometric shapes exist only in another dimension independent of present reality. We cannot see in nature any examples of pure geometry, he argued, only shapes that approximate our ideals. Perfect squares and circles exist in our thoughts—but not in real life. This epiphany laid the foundation for Plato’s doctrine of Forms. Math linked this material world of divisible reality to the higher realm of indivisible Forms.

  For ancient Greek thinkers, math brought the sacred into focus. Each soul, they affirmed, is made of mathematical ratios. Delving into geometry, explained Pythagoras, leads to the eternal. Empedocles described God as a rounded sphere equal to itself in every direction, without any beginning or end. It’s for this reason that Plato hung a sign over the door to his academy that said “Let no one devoid of geometry enter here.” For the Athenians, knowing geometry meant knowing that your soul is immortal.

  Speculative mathematics today remains a realm of beauty and poetry, with thinkers working on turning orbs inside out, or calculating the square root of negative one, or measuring spheres with a plurality of centers and no circumference. Such science is fully aestheticized, above material needs, less about practical application than it is about art. Realizing that pi can be calculated until the end of time has nothing to do with the promise of solutions; on the contrary, the transcendental and irrational number relating a circle’s diameter to its circumference demonstrates, again, our inability to attain certainty. This world remains a world of conjectures. We believe that dimensions exist yet can’t quite define or comprehend them. And what on earth is time, the fourth dimension? Newton argued that time is absolute; Einstein deemed it relative; and then Gödel proved that it does not even exist.

  Buddhists would agree. For them, this whole situation is illusory.

  * * *

  Around forty or so people had gathered to observe the Elixir of Life ceremony at Montreal’s Shambhala center. We all sat down on our meditation cushions. Volunteers handed out a photocopied instructional page and a vase of water perfumed with saffron.

  Ani Lodrö Palmo welcomed us, leading us through a silent meditation. I sat watching thoughts floating through my mind: If it isn’t belief, then how do we explain the idea that the current leader of Shambhala is a reincarnation of an eighteenth-century Tibetan teacher? Is that not belief? How can that be tested? Isn’t Buddhism just another flawed system of dealing with the human experience? But aren’t the benefits of meditation undeniable? Maybe I’m doubting too much, questioning things I shouldn’t be?

  Palmo then asked us to gather saffron water in our hands and splash it onto our faces. Doing so, we repeated lines from a photocopied handout: “This body that I possess has come together due to inconceivable circumstances. It is aging moment by moment. This is simply the nature of the human condition and I should celebrate it.”

  Having moved into the second half of my thirties, I felt that to my inconceivable core.

  We then purified our throats and uttered a prayer about speaking with compassion. Next, we sprinkled water over our hearts. Palmo described how all pleasures change to suffering. Within the shifting sands of impermanence, however, part of our mind is always connected to a greater infinite source: “From beginning-less time, this radiant, luminous mind has played in the space of uninhibited wisdom.”

  We then spent fifteen minutes contemplating a passage about the futility of hanging on to the past. We cannot overcome the process of aging, the ceremony’s handout explained, urging us to realize that all beings suffer this plight. Rather than hide from it, we should celebrate it. One paragraph stood out: “All the logic in the world will not save me from the simple truth that I age. Sickness is my companion; it follows me everywhere. I try to avoid the truth, but the painful conversation with sickness never ends. Death is my friend, the truest of friends, a true friend that never abandons me. Death is always waiting for me.”

  So this was the Elixir of Life? Illness as our one true friend. Death as soul mate. It was hard. As hard as reality. I sat there, shifting on my cushion, and tried to focus on the ceremony’s meaning while half listening to the sounds in the street below. There on my seat, I could feel it, life, as a person now alive who knows, as we all do, even if we try not to, that one day I must die.

  Epilogue

  Springs Eternal

  The explanation must be that I have been filled from some external source, like a jar from a spring.

  —Socrates, Phaedrus

  I write. I write that I am writing. Mentally I see myself writing that I’m writing and I can also see myself seeing that I am writing. I remember writing and also seeing myself writing. And I see myself remembering that I see myself writing and I remember seeing myself remembering that I was writing and I write seeing myself write that I remember having seen myself write that I saw myself writing that I was writing.

  —Salvador Elizondo, The Graphographer

  ALTHOUGH I couldn’t attend Auntie Tiny’s funeral in Budapest, I thought of her when my aunt Kati passed away as this book neared completion. Kati, my father’s older sister, was a paragon of elegance and sophistication who succumbed to pancreatic cancer on Christmas Eve 2012. The funeral service took place at the Mount Royal Cemetery. Her sons, my cousins, arranged for a memorial mass in Hungarian. The organist sang Gregorian alleluias about never dying. The priest sprinkled holy water upon her urn with a golden aspergillum. He spoke of “God’s sacred secrets,” the promise of eternal life, the way the cross teaches us that we live on, even though we die.

  If we believe.

  When the time came to take Communion, I wasn’t sure whether to join the queue or remain seated. “Should we go eat the wafer?” I asked my brother, next to me. He’d never taken Communion in his life, so he shook his head. I decided to stay in the pew with my family. My dad told us he’d dreamed of Kati the night she died. She told him she was setting out on a new adventure in a new land. He felt sure she was still out there, somewhere, elsewhere, among the stars. I could see the consolation of immortality helping him in his grief.

  As we put our coats on to leave the chapel, I noticed a Christmas tree covered in heart-shaped cards. Each had been inscribed with a message to a dead loved one: “Missing you, Suzanne.” “Always thinking of you.” “Grampa, I would’ve liked to have spent more time with you.” “Here we are, seven years later: I still love you with each passing day, and I continue to raise our girls the way you would have wanted me to.”

  I couldn’t help crying as I read one of them, in a child’s handwriting: “Mom, I never knew it was gonna hurt so much. Love, Lori.”

  Next to the tree stood a stack of brochures advertising the cemetery’s services. “The dictionary defines ‘perpetuity’ as eternity or the rest of time. At Mount Royal Cemetery, burial rights are offered in perpetuity.” As I read, I remembered Father Gervais, his funeral, every priest I’d heard speak about living forever and ever.
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  As much as my time with Father Gervais had affected me, I hadn’t become a believer, at least not in the monotheistic sense. But something had changed for me. It wasn’t just that I’d come to believe so firmly in the need to believe, in the fact that belief is implicit in everything we do. It was something more nebulous. When I came across a newspaper report about thieves taking stained-glass windows out of an old country church, it felt extremely wrong to me. It wasn’t just stealing; it was stealing from the Lord’s house. Yet even if I believed in God, I didn’t just believe in one God. I also believed in the gods of ancient Greece, in Haida divinities, in Hindu deities.

  I liked Einstein’s self-portrayal as “a deeply religious non-believer,” but I felt that I believed in all religions—without following any of them. Perhaps I had what Byron called “faithless faith.” He wrote of trying to wrench something out of death that might confirm or shake or make a faith, but all he found was mystery: “Here we are, and there we go—but where?” I certainly couldn’t answer, even after speaking with all those spiritual leaders. I’d learned so much from each of them, but respecting a theology doesn’t require converting. We can connect with political others simply by connecting with their belief systems, by appreciating their myths, by entering their stories. Even though I didn’t go regularly to the Sufi center, I was pretty sure I believed in the Sufic idea of Ultimate Reality. I definitely loved the Hasidic notion that God is in everything. And I’d never seen the anthropomorphic, white-bearded God of Christianity, but I’d definitely experienced the life force.

  Leaving Aunt Kati’s funeral, it occurred to me that I didn’t even believe in the life force anymore: I knew it to be real. If someone were to ask me whether I believed in it, I would answer like the man who, asked whether he believed in the possibility of being reborn, replied, “Believe in it? I seen it done.”

  I felt the life force on Copperfield’s private island; at Florida’s Fountain of Youth; in Marilyn Rossner’s message circle; at the 2068 party; with Rabbi Haim Sherrf’s family at Shabbat dinner. I felt it each time I saw Father Gervais. I felt it in Auntie Tiny’s apartment, and I felt it after Aunt Kati’s death. I felt it falling in love and I felt it while sleeping. That dream of the fountain had been a vision of the life force, the energy that sustained me throughout the years I spent writing this book.

  * * *

  You cannot end a never-ending quest, but you can finish the manuscript. I undertook several more research trips, but nothing brought me closer to the truth than the Buddhist Elixir of Life ceremony, with its message that aging isn’t something we need to recover from. It’s our condition, and we deserve to celebrate it. Death, too, is inescapable. It awaits all of us always. It’s our one true friend, our constant companion, our soul mate.

  Still, I kept hunting. I took a simulated submersible ride to the ocean floor, where volcanic vents are presumed to be the source of life on earth. I flew to Crete to see what the Minoans knew about immortality. (Answer: mysteries in caves.) I took mud baths, visited Turkish bathhouses, booked a sensory-deprivation appointment at Montreal’s Ovarium, a womblike flotation chamber. I researched the rejuvenatory and life-preserving effects of conjugation and autogamy on the fission rates of unicellular organisms. I didn’t get to the holy waters of Lourdes, but I did visit the ruins of a mineral-spring asklepieion in Athens. The stones glared silently.

  Trying to find a new way of thinking about progress, I spent days sifting through the archives of Joel Hedgpeth, marine biologist and founder of the Society for the Prevention of Progress. I found unpublished essays about oceanic life, poems, and love letters—but no resolution. Whether I believed in progress or not, I’d learned the First Noble Truth: suffering and cruelty won’t ever end. But there’s meaning in the struggle.

  I spent a month investigating hot springs across Italy. I went to the ancient waters of Bagno Vignoni in Tuscany. On a tip from Martha Morano, Copperfield’s publicist, I checked into a splendid thermal wellness resort called Adler Thermae. I headed up to sacred founts in the mountainous valleys of Alto Adige. I trekked into the crater of Pozzuoli, outside Naples, thought to be the entrance to Hades. All I found was mephitic vapors.

  I took a ferry to the volcanic island of Ischia, famed for its healing waters, where I spent time in Apollo’s Temple of the Sun. It consisted of three rooms dedicated to “the eternal cycle of life.” In the first, water poured from a holy vaginal relic symbolizing the origin of life. I tried to figure out why the mossy orifice was crowning a stone pyramid, but I couldn’t get too close without getting splashed. The second chamber celebrated earthly pleasures, with erotic bas-reliefs depicting various sexual positions. There were bacchanalian figures blowing into horns, flying toward the sun, serenading goats. It was bestial and lurid and full of strange vitality. Pink water lilies with erect yellow stamens smiled on knowingly. Apollo presided over it all in a carriage drawn by swans.

  The third room was the darkest. Here the theme was death: the end of mortal life. That stream from the sacred opening trickled across the floor before vanishing into a green grotto-vortex above which a statue of the Cumaean Sibyl gazed on pensively, finger to cheek. She knew not whence we came nor where we go. On the way out, I came upon a rock engraved with a line from a seventeenth-century poem: “All bliss consists in this: to do as Adam did.”

  What this Adam did next was indeed blissful: I traveled to Capri and jogged up a cliffside path that ended at a breathtaking sea-view lookout. The blue-green immensity lay beneath me, concealing infinity. Its cresting waves resembled a bedcover. Beneath the sheets, morphing slabs of obsidian and jade writhed together. Light fell off in sheaths.

  A fragment of Heraclitus came to mind: “As water springs from earth, so from water does the soul.” Springs. How curious that the word spring, whether referring to the season or to the stream of flowing water or to the upward movement, has in all cases a subtext of rejuvenation. To often be dead, and often return to life. Some birds hung in the air, black against the sun. Circling, their silhouettes burst into whiteness for a moment.

  Just like that, I was out of the forest. I turned around and looked upon the beauty of the trees. I looked back at the sea. Some themes will remain forever mysteries.

  A few days later, I found myself walking along the seashore in Positano. The tide offered up surging ringlets of foam. I stopped to pick up a few emerald-colored pieces of glass, bottle shards smoothed and rounded by the buffeting sea. I’d collected a jarful of these rough gems as a fourteen-year-old, even then fascinated by the ocean’s ability to make art of man’s debris. This is what I learned: nature transforms. Whatever happens next, it’ll be different from what we imagine.

  Acknowledgments

  MY HEARTFELT THANKS to the many people who helped this book become real, especially Mark Raymond Collins, Martha Morano, Sharry Flett, Warren Auld, Esther Rochon, Radwan Ghazi Moumneh, Himo Martin, Cheskie Lebowitz, Jonathan Freedman, Leslie Feist, Nicole Pierpont, Sophie Leddick, Taras Grescoe, Jocelyn Zuckerman, Bill Sertl, Peter Würth, Tyler Graham, Sarah Amelar, Korbett Mathews, Charles Levin, Ian Jackson, David Tobias, and Janice Kerfoot. Thank you to the St. Augustine Historical Society, the Rene Goupil House, the Cryonics Institute, the Esalen Institute, the Internet, and the libraries of the world. Thank you to the QWF, Lori Schubert, the Canada Council, the Public Lending Right Program, and Access Copyright. To Warren and the Hedgpeth family: I still hope to write about the Society for the Prevention of Progress one day. Much thanks to John, Vanessa, Dexter, and all at the Long Haul. Thank you to Demetra and the Zoubris gang for putting up with me (aka Larry). Efharisto George and Jimmy Vitoroullis. Oncle Jax Andison: “It’s been a service pleasuring you.”

  For the conversations and insights: Melanie Sifton, Donald Antrim, Lorin Stein, Jenna Wright, Clay Weiner, Tracy Martin, Billy Mavreas, Doctor Oz, Michelle Sterling, Ithamar Silver, Daniel K. Seligman, Jessica Wee, Miguel Syjuco, Edith Werbel, Peter Meehan, Roger Tellier-Craig, Sabrina Ratté, Danny, Jesse, Nat,
Tim, Cathy, and John Riviere, the Sanchez clan—Carlos and Anny, Jason and Elena, Louise and Joe, Suroosh Alvi, Tim Hecker, Brett Stabler, Yaniya Lee, Matt Brown, Robbie Dillon, Fred Morin, Cassady Sniatowsky, Michael “Guru” Felber, Elliot Jacobson, Arjun Basu, Philippe Tremblay-Berberi, Bartek Komorowski, Tim Fletcher, Theo Diamantis, Nathan Curry, Zoe Mowat, Michelle Marek, Anthony Kinik, Thea Metcalfe, Robin Simpson, Anna Phelan, Sarah Louise Musgrave, Hart Snider, Aisling Chin-Yee, Mark Slutsky, Susannah Heath-Eaves, Mila Aung-Thwin, Bob Moore, Yung Chang, Allan Moyle, and Kurt Ossenfort.

  The Tessler Agency played a key role in the story of how this book became a book. I’m thrilled to now be working with Tracy Bohan of the Wylie Agency.

  My eternal gratitude to everyone at Scribner, especially Nan Graham, Susan Moldow, Kelsey Smith, Leah Sikora, and Paul Whitlatch. I’m indebted to Steve Boldt for his excellent copyediting work, and to Dan Cuddy and the entire production team. My editor and copilot, Alexis Gargagliano, encouraged me to go deeper and never wavered in her faith, patience, and understanding. Thank you, Alexis, for guiding me, for collaborating with me, for being so generous and so brilliant.

  Much thanks to the fantastic team at Doubleday/Random House Canada: Lynn Henry, Amy Black, Kristin Cochrane, Christopher Frey, and Adria Iwasutiak.

  Loving thanks to Annie Briard, David Gawley, Kicsi Néni, Kati Néni, Antal, Ricsi, Zsuzsi, Paul, Peter, Brian, Mandy, Ian, Sheelagh, Willie, Sam, and Laura.

  Thank you to the incomparable Liane Balaban for the wisdom, poetry, and inspiration: “Toujours nous irons plus loin sans avancer jamais.”