Living Forever Sounds Good — Until You Think About This

As a species, we accept our inevitable decay, decline, and death. >> Okay, so this is this rich guy, Brian Johnson. I actually hadn't heard of him before until this, but he has this agenda of using breakthrough medical technology to live in theory forever to vastly expand the human lifespan. This is his idea to beat mortality. And then the question which arises and this is what sort of the interwebs are discussing the ethical question as well as so sort of like the emotional question. Would you even want to live forever? Is that the way it's supposed to be? All right. [laughter] So I want to talk about this from a theological perspective. First of all you should know when Adam and Eve were created they were created to be immortal. What else does it mean that they were told don't eat from the tree of knowledge on the day that you eat from it you will surely die. They ate from it. They didn't drop dead. doesn't mean that on the day from eat you eat from it you'll die. It means that on the day you eat from it you will become doomed to eventually die. So that implies that the way they were created at first was to live forever. So actually you should know that mortality is an aberration. It is not the way we were originally created. That's one thing to know. Let's talk about it in more practical terms. Let's talk about not immortality. Let's just talk about super long lifespans. Is that even something that somebody wants? So I'll tell you an interesting sick story. This happened in Russia in the late 1700s, 1780s or '90s probably. And the rabbi in the story, we call him the alterb, the old rabbi, he was the first rabbi of Kabad. His name was Schneer Salman. One of his and one of his adherence was named Rabusil. specifically called Yusil Lepler because in those days Jews didn't go by official last names. They just go they would go by different ways of describing them. Lepeler means he was from a town called Lepel. Okay. So the teaching is like this Lepler came to the alterb in what we call which is like a one-on-one meeting with a righteous holy man. And the alterb told Rabbi Kusil Lepler that he wants to give him a blessing for a long life. For long life and I'm going to read to you the the Yiddish and I'll translate. So Rabus answered, [snorts] "But not with peasant years." Now what do you mean peasant years? It's a very specific like Russian Cidic Jewish expression doesn't mean like a literal peasant. It meant spiritual impoverishment as he explained. He's parap paraphrasing their words from the psalms which they have eyes and they don't see they have ears and they don't hear. Not talking about physical blindness or deafness. We're talking about people who are intact. They can hear and they see physically, but they're spiritually numb. They don't perceive spirituality. So, Rabbi Kosil tells the alterb, "You want to give me a long life? Hold on a second. What's the quality of life? Am I going to be spiritually sensitive? Am I going to perceive godliness during the duration of that lifespan? I don't want to be like one of those people who don't see godliness and they don't hear godliness. So the end of the story is the alterb did in the end bless with long life and he lived to be almost 100 years old. But the point was that he had spiritual quality of life. And this I think is an important concept to enter into the whole discussion. Quality of life can mean a lot of things. It can mean being healthy physically, being able to have, you know, mobility and freedom and autonomy, which is super important. It can mean cognitive functioning, super important. These things are super, super important. But at the end of the day, what's life all about? You know, we're souls and bodies. We're sent here for for for a mission. And if you're just going to be a soul and a body and forget that you're a soul and identify exclusively with the body and that you're going to think life is just about being in a body in order to be a body and to have more physical experiences for the sake of physical experiences, then not only there's no point in growing old, what what's even the point of of one day of existence like that? So I think it's important to enter into this whole discussion as medical advancements do lengthen our lives that that's potentially a great thing but it needs to be coupled with an awakening a spiritual awakening that we use these prolonged lifetimes lifespans to discover deeper and deeper levels of God consciousness. And we know that God is infinite. So even if you were given infinite years, you would never get bored discovering more depth to the infinite one. There's always when you when you're talking about God, there's never uh graduation day. So there's no such thing as well, what are we going to do for eternity. If you're talking about a relationship with an infinite God, even in eternity, we'll will stay fresh and exciting. But that's only when you're engaged in that process. So, God willing, you know, the doctors will do their part and give people the ability to live longer and to have use of their bodies and their cognitive functions, and that's all great, but at the same time, um, spiritual teachers have to do their part to encourage people to actually be God conscious and to use all of their days in a meaningful Okay.