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Page 100

I don't want to get your hopes up.
When you die, you're dead -- that's it.
If I'm wrong, just come right back and
show me your receipt (one life, slightly
lived), and I'll give you double your money
back. (Of course, you won't be able to
take it with you.) Hard words, but I
don't want to set you up for disappointment.

After all, how would you feel if, expecting
to find yourself immortal and face to face
with God, you wake up one morning
to find yourself nothing at all, just dead
(whatever that is -- I mean, who is it
that's dead?) -- wouldn't that be
disappointing? What a drag! I'm dead
and I don't even know it! But,

hey! what if we're all dead and we don't
even know it? And hey! what if we're
all alive and we don't even know it?
Would that be death too?

But truly, I don't want to get your hopes up
by telling you you're immortal, because your
immortality is nothing to hope for. It just is,
right now (if ever). You don't have to knock off
your body to know you're alive, to know you exist,
always have, always will (well, I certainly think that
if I'd been absolutely nothing for an eternity
before 1942, I'd remember it; don't you?),

with nothing to hope for other than
the games we here and now create
for each other out of nothing.

Note: Think about it: If you were immortal, and if immortality were simply a matter of duration, rather than a present-time knowing, at what point would you know you were immortal? You could shed body after body, survive death after death, and only know that you had survived so far. Don't wait for time to prove your immortality to you. Time knows nothing about it. Surviving the death of a body rids you of one of the lies that impugn your immortality, but the only way you can KNOW you're immortal is to be it and be aware of being that which is immortal.

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